126 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865in 1859 – which involved an attempt to incite a slave revolt and ended in several
deaths, including that of Brown himself and his two sons. Brown, Thoreau believed, was
a man who was carrying out the principles he himself had championed: principles of
freedom and equality that, sometimes, it was necessary to fight and die for. And
Thoreau said as much in three lectures, “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859),
“The Last Days of John Brown” (1859), and “After the Death of John Brown” (1861).
A few years before his meeting with John Brown, in the period 1849–1853, Thoreau
made several brief trips, which supplied the material for his posthumously published
books, Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee
in Canada (1866). During his final years, he made further journeys to Cape Cod and
Maine, then to the Great Lakes, but his increasingly failing health meant that he
spent more and more time in and around Concord. Not that he minded this: his
reading carried him far and wide, so that he could declare, “I have travelled a good
deal in Concord.” And study and writing kept him busy. He worked on a long ethno-
logical study of the Indians, which was never completed. He continued his journal,
indefatigably: by his death, he had written more than two million words, the basis of
all his books. And he developed his interest in botanical science, carrying a botanical
guide with him and collecting specimens wherever he went on his walks in the vicin-
ity of Concord. That interest formed the basis of a great but unfinished project:
manuscripts that on 1993 and 2000 were published as Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion
and Other Late Natural History Writings and Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last
Manuscript. The two books resurrect the voice and vision of Thoreau, reminding
readers of why his is a central and living presence in American writing. Of the two,
Wild Fruits is the more significant, a major work in its own way. It is a record of the
ordinary, often hidden wild plants of the neighborhood, organized according to
the calendar year. Beginning with accounts of “the winged seeds of the elms” and the
“thousand downy spheres” of the dandelions, and ending with the fruits of winter,
Thoreau attends closely to even the humblest plant, obliging us, the readers, to do so
too. As we accompany him on his “excursions,” as he continues to call them, we learn
about the significance of the everyday. Like an ideal companion, Thoreau mixes
learning, passion, and wit to convince us that what we are seeing merits, even
demands, attention. We learn to call things by their right names. Above all, we learn
again the simple lesson all Thoreau’s work teaches: that, as Walden has it, heaven is
“under our feet as well as over our heads.” In lively detail, Wild Fruits discloses the
vital thread connecting all forms of life and shows how coexistence is imperative. By
unlocking the miraculous in the commonplace, here and elsewhere in his writings,
Thoreau reveals its redemptive potential, all that links its survival to ours. Or, as he
tersely puts it, at the end of Wild Fruits, “Nature is another name for health.”Voices of African-American identity
Fuller linked the emancipation of women to the emancipation of slaves; Emerson and
Thoreau found their commitment to self-emancipation leading them into support of
the abolitionist movement and, in Thoreau’s case, of abolition by any means necessary.GGray_c02.indd 126ray_c 02 .indd 126 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM